In a poignant statement about Okovi (the Slavic word for “shackles”), Danilova details the cathartic album as a meditation on death in its various guises.

“Last year, I moved back to the woods in Wisconsin where I was raised,” she said. “I built a little house just steps away from where my dilapidated childhood tree fort is slowly recombining into earth. Okovi was fed by this return to roots and several very personal traumas … While writing Okovi, I endured people very close to me trying to die, and others trying desperately not to. Meanwhile, I was fighting through a haze so thick I wasn’t sure I’d find my way to the other side. Death, in all of its masks, has been encircling everyone I love, and with it the questions of legacy, worth and will.”

Danilova elaborated on the album title’s heavy symbolism, writing, “We’re all shackled to something – to life, to death, to bodies, to minds, to illness, to people, to birthright, to duty. Each of us born with a unique debt, and we have until we die to pay it back. Without this cost, what gives us the right to live? And moreover, what gives us the right to die? Are we really even free to choose?”

The singer-songwriter collaborated on the album with longtime live bandmate Alex DeGroot, producer-musician WIFE, cellist Shannon Kennedy (Pedestrian Deposit) and percussionist Ted Bynes. Okovi is the first Zola Jesus LP since 2014’s Taiga – it also marks her return to Sacred Bones, whom she describes as “the closest group of people I’ll ever have to blood-bound family.”

Zola Jesus also announced a 26-date tour launching September 16th in Hudson, New York and concluding November 7th in London.